The U.S. Department of Education has released final application guidelines for $4.35 billion in Race to the Top funding, part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
The final application includes significant changes to the proposal released by the U.S. DOE in July. The final application also clarifies that states should use multiple measures to evaluate teachers and principals, including a strong emphasis on the growth in achievement of their students. But it also reinforces that successful applicants will need to have rigorous teacher and principal evaluation programs and use the results of teacher evaluations to inform what happens in schools.
The RTT guidelines also reinforce the requirement that states develop and adopt “common core standards.”
“The president said last week that Race to the Top will require states to take an all-hands-on-deck approach,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. “We will award grants to the states that have led the way in reform and will show the way for the rest of the country.”
The DOE will hold two rounds of competition for the grants. For the first round, it will accept states’ applications until the middle of January 2010. Peer reviewers will evaluate the applications, and the department will announce the winners in spring. Applications for the second round will be due June 1, 2010, with the announcement of all the winners by Sept. 30, 2010.
Following the release of the final guidelines, Assemblywoman Julia Brownley, D-Santa Monica, announced she is crafting legislation tailored to ensure California meets the final guidelines to compete for RTT grants. The legislation is part of a collaborative effort that has included education stakeholders around the state and has drawn from hours of public testimony in Assembly Education hearings.
An Assembly Education Committee hearing on Race to the Top was scheduled for Nov. 18 in Los Angeles. It focused on two of the four reform areas delineated in the RTT framework: producing great teachers and leaders, and turning around struggling schools. An earlier hearing explored improving data to support instruction and adopting quality standards and assessments.
Brownley said now that the U.S. Department of Education has released its final guidelines for the grants, California should move forward to ensure it is well positioned to apply, but also that reforms are thoughtfully planned.
“It’s one thing to hastily pass a quiltwork of proposals aimed solely at making California competitive for a one-time grant, and quite another to construct a comprehensive plan that will have significant, long-lasting effects on our education system,” Brownley said.
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger called a special legislative session to address RTT. He supports legislation to ensure California is competitive for approximately $700 million in federal grant money, and he advanced a set of reform proposals, packaged in Senate Bill X5 1, Romero, D-Los Angeles, which the state Senate passed prior to the release of the final guidelines.
The governor is now urging Speaker Karen Bass and the state Assembly to act quickly on those reforms.
However, ACSA continues to have concerns with the current version of SBX5 1. The assocaition has suggested amendments and in some cases deletion of sections that impose new state mandates. ACSA is also working with the Assembly to address the RTT guidelines and working to determine what is and is not required to be statutorily defined.
“ACSA has developed a set of mission statements around the four assurances of effective teachers and leaders, data, struggling schools and standards and assessments,” said ACSA Legislative Advocate Sherry Skelly Griffith. “We believe that ACSA and the state should focus on what we want for California not just what we don’t want.”
ACSA is also part of an Education Coalition workgroup seeking involvement in the actual writing of the final RTT plan which must be signed by the governor, state superintendent of public instruction and president of the State Board of Education.
For more information on the recently released guidelines, visit the U.S. DOE online at www.ed.gov/programs/racetothetop.